Stuck in Wet Concrete in your Brand New Shoes: The Feel of Splatoon 2

There are certain actions in video games that we don't just experience, we feel it. They're visceral. Well-animated, impactful attacks in a fighting game feel as great as a perfectly controllable jump in a platformer, for some of the same reasons. Gameplay mechanics like these are usually simple, give the player a lot of feedback and impact everything else you do.

Splatoon 2 is full of them. Every little mechanic in Splatoon was designed around its ink system, and  In the middle of a turf war, the ink is your weapon, your savior and your doom. If you haven't played, it goes something like this:

You've got a super-powered Super Soaker filled with your ink. It's how you defeat your enemies, but you also splash that ink on the ground. You can hide or swim through ink of your color, which lets you move way faster and also fills your ink tank. The other team's also got Super Soakers (or huge, menacing paint rollers) armed with a complementary color of ink. Their ink slows you down, and every step in enemy ink sucks your shoes in like wet concrete. It also does damage, up to a point. This stuff gets everywhere.

It's pretty simple in concept, really. Using the same weapon for movement, cover, and But as you trade volleys of paint, you're also painting the ground around each other. Remember how you get stuck in enemy ink? Yeah. If you don't defeat your opponents quick enough, you inevitably end up in a pile of the stuff and become a sitting duck.

I took a wrong turn and ended up in a world of brightly-colored panic. I think purple team deliberately cut off my escape route to watch me suffer.

Territory Control, Miniaturized.

Imagine you're fighting another Squidkid and you realize you're outmatched. Maybe you missed a few too many shots, or maybe she's on the high ground with a big Charger or a ink-spewing minigun.
Having high ground is a serious advantage. Sure, you can just paint the wall and swim up, but that takes time and you can still be shot doing it. Ink from most weapons travels in an arc, meaning she might be able to hit you from up there while your shots fall short.

So you want to get away. Since you can only swim through your ink, you look behind you where you hopefully left a trail. If it's still there, sweet, you can dive in and get out of there. But if another enemy painted over it, you might be left stranded. Being stuck in enemy territory is literal when that territory is covered in a layer of wet glue.

But of course if you turn to shoot at the ground, you aren't shooting at the enemy. This is a decision I have to make often. It's usually a pretty panicked decision, admittedly, because I'm not the greatest at aiming. If that girl on the high ground isn't the greatest either, you might get away with it, shooting and swimming until you get back to the relative safety of your color territory.

Or, if you're having a really bad day, your gun might just cough and splutter, because you ran out of ink.

Low Ink! The Splattershot Pro runs dry really fast. I didn't have enough to save my Charger friend here. Luckily, I had room to swim away.

Running on fumes

Ok, let's get general for a second. If you've ever played a survival horror game like Resident Evil or anything where ammo is a precious resource, you'll recognize that being out of ammo is terrifying. It's one of modern gaming's clearest examples of how to get an emotional reaction out of a simple mechanic.

Splatoon is definitely not a survival horror. But that feeling is still there, and it's almost stronger than in other games. Your ink is your life, remember? Being out of ammo means you're not only defenseless, you're trapped.

As strong as the feeling is, it's short-lived. You slowly regenerate ink, giving you a few shots every second. It won't stop that ink roller trying to pancake you, but it can paint some turf so you can dive in and fill your tank back up.

But in that situation, when your enemy's got you locked down, out of ink and out of escape routes, the panic is real. And on the off chance you make it out, it feels amazing.

Getting a feel for it

When all of this goes against you, it can be pretty tense. Sometimes, in the worst situations, you get a Splat Bomb tossed at your feet and there's literally nothing you can do. It's crazy how powerless this colorful Nintendo game can make you feel, but there it is.

There is always something you can do about it, though, and that's what makes learning this game so rewarding.

A good chunk of learning Splatoon is ink management and territory control. Learning how fast each different weapon consumes ink, learning to leave escape routes and paint over the right enemy lanes, and when you have enough ink or need to fill up. It's a lot of fast decision making, but since it's all built around a handful of simple mechanics, it makes it one of the best feeling multiplayer games I've played in a while.

Far Cry 4 Review

(250 word review originally published in The Wake student magazine at the University of Minnesota)

Far Cry 4 lets you hunt leopards from the back of an elephant

Released 11/18 for PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and PC

                Far Cry’s new location is one rather unlike the jungles of the previous game- Kyrat, a fictional Himalayan country next to India. Other than the differences in deadly fauna and the spectacular world of Kyrat, suprising little about how Far Cry 4 plays compared to its predecessor has changed.

                You play as Ajay Ghale, a native of Kyrat, who returns from America to bring his mother’s ashes back to their homeland. Ajay gets caught up in a rebellion against the despotic and fashionable “king” of Kyrat, Pagan Min. Min is my favorite kind of villain, funny yet hateable. It seems like writers in recent videogames love to focus on the world and its main antagonist.

The eclectic and exciting cast of characters defines the story of Far Cry 4. There’s a power struggle between the two leaders of the rebellion that the player has to choose between, and a host of memorable other characters like Longinus, the gun-crazed priest who says “for the meek shall inherit the earth, my friend, all they need are some good guns!” However, Ajay’s character leaves a lot to be desired.

Far Cry 4’s gameplay is almost exactly the same as Far Cry 3, Hunt animals to upgrade your gear and take on missions, capture outposts, even climb towers to uncover the map. There’s now co-op, but not in story missions. Nothing groundbreaking, but very well done, and the world of Kyrat is a breathtaking place to behold. Just watch out for honey badgers!

Guacamelee! review

When you first go to play Guacamelee, which you are going to because it's awesome, the first thing you'll notice is the visual style. Sure, it's 2D but what indie game isn't these days? I didn't know I wanted it but when I found it I realized how much games have lacked it: an awesome Mexican-inspired art style. It's bright, colorful, and humorous, especially in the towns of Pueblucho and Santa Luchia. These luchador-loving hub worlds are full of references to video games and internet culture in the form of posters, such as the Mario Brothers re-imagined as luchadores:

In fact, the entire game is full of references to other games, from Mario and Metroid to Castle Crashers. The dialogue as well makes numerous references, and is humorously aware of it, giving the classic "save the girl from the big bad guy" story its unique charm.

Also the soundtrack is amazing. Sort of a mashup of electronic beats with more traditional latin sounds. I'm always a sucker for a great soundtrack, and this one really fits with the hectic fighting.

Not just for opening doors

A luchador lives to fight, and the protagonist Juan does that very well. In its most basic form, Guacamelee's combat is simple 2D brawling, with punching and kicking and throwing, and a dodge roll ability thrown in for good measure. It feels great to send enemies flying into other enemies  but there's more to it than just that. See, Guacamelee is a game in the tradition of Metroidvania games in which you must find new abilities to progress, like a double jump to get to a new area and the ability to smash through a previously unpassable door. What Guacamelee does differently is instead of giving you, say, a grappling hook to climb up stuff, it gives you a fighting move that's primarily used in combat as well as getting you up there. Many fights require you to use all of your abilities, and the ones that don't require them will probably kick your ass if you don't incorporate them into your punching repertoire. This means that as the platforming parts get more complicated as you acquire more moves, the fights get more and more complex as well. What starts off as punching an enemy until you can throw him at another quickly gets entangled with mechanics like air combos, breaking shields with specific moves, and enemies that can't be hit with most of your attacks.

Perfect Pacing

There's one thing that's a little less obvious that makes Guacamelee great from a game design perspective. With each new mechanic added, like an uppercut that can be used as an extra jump comes new possible situations, both in platforming and combat. What Guacamelee does really well is fully exploring each of these ideas but never to the point of making that idea stale. For example, there's one fight late in the game where it's just Juan against flying, stationary time bomb enemies. Each wave threw a wave of these "exploders" at you, and you'd have to destroy them in order or take damage. Each wave was more complicated than the next, until one wave leads you in a circle of the entire room, forcing you to use every one of your abilities with precise timing. Then, the fight ends and there's never a fight like that again.

The game moves from one idea to the next, seamlessly and quickly. It keeps it short and sweet, making it only about 8 hours long for me. There's never a fight where you think "this is exactly like the last one" and never a platforming segment that has you repeating an action until it gets boring. That's what the pacing of a game like this should be like, and Guacamelee got it perfect!

P.S. The entire game can be played local co-op which is awesome.

Dark Souls 2 BRO-OP

Dark Souls 2, like all the Souls games, focuses mostly on singleplayer. But for players who need a little help or who just want to engage in some jolly co-operation, there's co-op. In Dark Souls 1, summoning another player was a mysterious affair. You had no clue who they were, had no way other than gestures to communicate with them (in fact on Xbox 360 the game didn't allow you to be in a party chat while playing in online mode), and you might never see their summon sign again. It was also down to chance if the peer-to-peer connection system would even let you connect. I wasted sometimes fifteen minutes in one spot just trying to summon two people for a difficult boss.

Die with your friends!

Dark Souls 2 took a step in the right direction for those of us who would like to play with our friends instead of random players across the internet. Most exciting for us Dark Souls 1 fans was that they made dedicated servers for matchmaking. This means summoning is many times more stable, but there's still peer-to-peer connection in the game itself. So for PVP'ers that means faster connection times but still enough lag to make some fights downright broken. Anyways, FromSoftware decided this time to include things like the Name Ring, which allows players to choose a "god" (basically choosing a server) so they can more easily find their friends who chose the same god, and included voice chat. Nobody really uses the voice chat, but if you're into yelling at random people over the internet to help you against that giant lava demon you're fighting, you can do that.

A big problem with the matchmaking, co-op and PVP alike, is that the server matches players up based on their total souls collected, called "soul memory", and not their actual level or the strength of their gear. This means if someone doesn't lose any souls and puts it all into boosting their stats and upgrading one set of equipment, they become overpoweringly strong compared to a newer player who loses souls to deaths and spends a lot on upgrades and trying out a variety of items. Also, if you want to co-op with a friend both of you have to keep your soul memories close or you won't be allowed to connect. If it were me, I would have based matchmaking on a combination of equipped gear strength and character levels.

The Bro-Op

I did an entire playthrough of the game co-op, and we had a great time with it. He took on the role of the squishy mage, who would stand back and throw dark magic and fireballs at the enemies, while I quickly fell into the classic tank class, covered in armor, swinging a mace, and eventually becoming a wall with a giant stone greatshield. We powered through the game, though mages aren't that effective early on, and our complimentary builds made short work of any boss. Because one of us was dealing magic damage, the other could focus on pure physical destruction.

Because we could focus on our roles, we became pretty overpowered pretty quickly. Another upside to co-oping the entire game is each character gets twice the souls they would playing solo, because due to the host/ summoned phantom system we had to basically play the game twice, once for each of our games. It felt less like a dangerous Dark Souls experience and like a MMO dungeon raid, which was a good change of pace from the over-cautious play the game demands when playing solo. Overall, I can say that co-oping the game is an awesome thing to try out, but it's easy to tell that the game wasn't designed around two players.

Double fist-pump selfie! Note FromSoft's hilariously bad name censorship here: I'm supposed to be "Bro Knight"

Transistor's Fantastic Art Style

If I haven't already said it, Bastion is one of my favorite games of all time. It's game mechanics were awesome for a debut game, but what really made it stand out to me was Darren Korb's beautiful soundtrack, and Jen Zee's even more beautiful artwork. So when they announced Transistor I was super excited, and when it came out yesterday I spent a couple of hours with the game and I absolutely love the art. The game's theme and art style, especially of its setting, Cloudbank, strikes me as being a combination of Art Deco, cyberpunk, and Jen Zee's unique surreal style. Allow me to explain.

The Artstyle of Bastion

One of Jen Zee's character doodles. Strange, but pretty!

Bastion's visual theme is basically the antithesis of the grey realism of many modern games. The idea of a world being rebuilt after being destroyed by some Calamity, and the wondrous settings and creatures you encounter throughout gives the whole game its dreamlike quality. Zee's artwork fit this perfectly. It's colorful, mysterious, and in my opinion, absolutely amazing! Her Deviantart gallery is full of characters from video games and many just out of imagination, but Bastion didn't have a lot of characters in it, due to the whole apocalypse thing, so much of the artwork there was in the background and world design. It's definitely definitely very fantastical, like a fairy tale. The city in Transistor is a bit more gritty (I hate saying gritty because it's always used to hate on Call of Duty) and more dark, so the artwork has drawn influence from different sources.

Transistor's Visual Design: Somewhere between Bioshock and Blade Runner

Screenshot of Cloudbank about an hour into the game. Lovely lighting, and neon signs! I do love the look of neon.

Wait, Bioshock and Blade Runner? What's similar in the art of a 1982 film and a 2007 video game? Both are set in massive cities. Rapture, Bioshock's underwater city built in the alt-history 1940's, is a spot-on example of Art Deco, with it's symmetry, geometric shapes, and luxurious ornamentation. Art Deco comes from the decades after WW1, and is representative of the huge wealth brought about by the industrial revolution. The story of Rapture was that in the underwater city, away from government and moral restrictions, wealth and industry could flourish. It did more than flourish, it ran rampant, and Rapture destroyed itself in civil war before the events of Bioshock. The abandoned city stands as a reminder of that destructive excess.

Blade Runner was set in Los Angeles, around 2020. Los Angeles has changed in that it's become a murky mix of global culture, especially a lot of Asian influence, as well as influences from all over the world. It's no less dangerous and dirty, though. It's not the sort of science fiction where everything's clean and white and shiny, it's cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is usually set in the near-future, where technology has advanced but society hasn't gotten any better. The city in Blade Runner is overpopulated, filthy, and full of crime and biotechnology that's neither completely ethical or legal.

Transistor's Cloudbank, though a lot more colorful than Los Angeles in Blade Runner, has a lot of cyberpunk influence. From what I can tell, Cloudbank was pretty peaceful before the events of the game, but the enemies in Transistor are some sort of digital horde called the Process that are "processing" the city into something lifeless and sterile. The Transistor, the titular blue sword-like weapon, is very digital in nature, and you can change it's uses around by combining functions, like you're programming this mysterious device. Lastly, Cloudbank is connected by a web of terminals that gather and disseminate information to the citizens, making the entire city reliant on this information technology.

Overall I think the design of the city leans closer to the clean lines of Art Deco, but the plot of the game is closer to cyberpunk, in that it involves technology and government going wrong. Both of these influences work great together in a way I don't think anyone has done before Transistor. 

QTE's in Tomb Raider

When I saw reviews of the Tomb Raider reboot, a common complaint was that it was just Uncharted but with Lara Croft. I loved Uncharted 1 and 2 so I knew I would like Tomb Raider. It's not exactly a recent release considering the pace of internet time, but it went on sale for five bucks on Steam and I just had to buy it. It is as awesome as I thought it was going to be! Another complaint I heard was about the abundance of everyone's favorite game mechanic, Quick Time Events. So when these "press this button to not fail" moments came up I took notice.

Press Y to not die.

Mini-QTE's

If this were Assassins Creed you'd grab the cliff automatically.

Ever played Gears of War? It popularized a mechanic called "active reload". Basically, Epic Games decided that pressing a button to reload your weapon was too boring, and decided to add a second button press that had to be timed right so you could reload faster or jam your gun if you mistimed it. The fact that it's a timed button press makes it sort of like a quick time event. Tomb Raider has the same sort of mechanic, not in reloading but in climbing. Lara gets a climbing axe early in the game, and gets to test it out right away climbing some mountain cliffs. After the first few jumps, where you have to press one button to jump and another to catch the rock with your axe, it stops telling you to press that button. You've just gotta remember to swing that axe or you'll just bounce off the wall. The same thing happens when the game teaches you that sometimes the edges you grab will break, and you're gonna have to hit another button to recover. It makes climbing much more exciting, because unlike Assassins Creed or Uncharted there's a risk you're gonna fall off. I'm going to classify these mechanics as "mini QTE's" because they're timed button presses where failing causes you to lose progress. They're not scripted and you actually learn to do them instead of being told to every time, and if you fail it often just continues I think they're a really nice unobtrusive way to spice up a tired old "press up to climb up" scenario. It certainly worked to keep me immersed.

The bad, the worse, and the downright silly: Cutscene QTE's

BF4- click mouse to win!

If you've ever even heard of videogame critique you've heard someone complaining loudly about Quick Time Events and how Call of Duty and/or Battlefield sucks, usually in the same sentence. So as not to bore you I won't go too into why it sucks, but a Quick Time Event in the usual sense of the phrase is where there's a cinematic scene where the player must press a button when a prompt appears onscreen, or you lose. Either press that button quick or you'll just have to restart. It's boring at best because you're not controlling the game, it's just showing what's happening. The point of most games is to put the player in control of a scenario. Anyways,  Tomb Raider's got some of these, like the one at the top, and they remind people of stuff like this BF4 scene here. These QTE's are the ones people complain about.

Too long, didn't read? Basically we should have more "mini QTE's" in action games, like active reload and Tomb Raider's climbing, because they do the same thing as cutscene QTE's, which is to get the player involved, putting them in control of an otherwise automatic event, or in the case of "press Y to win" give them the illusion of control. Either way, it can be fun! Just don't go making an entire game out of it.

Dark Souls Metagame: Fight Clubs

If this is your first time at Dark Souls Fight Club, I'll explain it for you.

I've already explained how much I love Dark Souls. Recently, with Dark Souls 2 coming out in a week, I've been getting involved in a part of the game I rarely experienced my first few playthroughs- PVP. After getting knocked around by giant greatswords, instantly killed by overpowered black magic, and pulverized by teams of gang-killers, I learned quite a lot about the game hidden beneath the game. There's an incredible set of unwritten rules, often broken more than followed, that nevertheless give rise to an interesting phenomenon. At the agreed-upon level for honorable PVP, something called Fight Clubs occur in one of the starting areas of the game, the Undead Burg.

Two Red Phantoms fight each other in the Undead Burg, the most common place for Fight Clubs.

To understand what's going on here, here's a bit of info you need to know: 

-A host player in human form can be invaded by enemy red phantom players, and can be invaded by more than one.

-The host can also summon red phantoms if they leave a red summon sign. 

-Red phantoms can fight each other, and are rewarded with souls for killing each other.

-Hosts can't be invaded if they've defeated the boss of that area. 

-Hosts can pick up souls, basically experience, from dead red phantoms regardless of who kills them.

This means that invaders looking for some fun fights with other players of the same level can invade the host just to fight other invaders. The winner of the invader fight sticks around to challenge the next invader, and both them and the host gets souls for the kill. The invader, if they recollect their souls, doesn't lose anything either! It's a win-win-win! Fight Clubs are just one example of the ways the Dark Souls community has created a deep metagame.

The Game Within the Game

This metagame includes rules for fair dueling, which say the host in a duel isn't allowed to heal, because the game doesn't let the invading red phantom use their healing potions. If either player in a duel heals, usually this signals to the other that anything goes, and the encounter devolves from a gentleman's duel to a fantasy medieval street fight, complete with underhanded magical tactics and shady glitch exploiting. Of course some people, called gankers, completely disregard these rules and attack single enemies in groups of three, becoming hated throughout the community. I think the developer actually wanted to encourage these rules to develop. Dark Souls' player interaction was purposefully limited to actions and guessing at what your opponent, helper, or host is trying to tell you. This improvised communication is especially prevalent in fight club situations, where a player can bow to start a duel, raise a shield repeatedly at someone to tell them to back off, and even strike a taunting pose over an annoying opponents body. 

But these rules only apply to this particular game. I'm sure Demon's Souls had a completely different set of unofficial rules and etiquette, and Dark Souls 2 will start this process all over again. What's most exciting is that everyone who plays the game soon after release will have a hand in creating the metagame of Dark Souls 2, willing or not. But before people begin to master the new challenges, I think there's going to be complete anarchy. The multiplayer aspects will play out only according to the rules of the game.

So if you come up against me in Dark Souls 2, you best be ready, because "fighting fair" will not exist yet.


P.S. If people want, I could write a bunch about the evolution of Dark Souls 2's metagame as it happens, because I'll definitely be playing the hell out of it.